What the Utah Consumer Privacy Act means for you

The Utah privacy law – called the Utah Consumer Privacy Act – passed in March 2022. It went into effect December 31, 2023.

What is the Utah Consumer Privacy Act?

The Utah Consumer Privacy Act is a consumer privacy law that gives you some basic rights regarding how businesses collect, use and sell your data. Exercising those rights requires some work on your part. Let’s take a look.

What does the Utah privacy law do for consumers?

The Utah privacy law gives you several rights regarding your personal information:

• Right to Access: You can request a copy of the personal information businesses have collected about you.
• Right to Correct: You can request a business correct inaccuracies in the personal information it has collected about you.
• Right to Delete: You can request a business delete the personal information that you have provided to them. 
• Right to Opt Out: You can opt out of businesses selling your personal information to advertisers and other third parties.

To access, correct or delete your data, or opt out of data sales, you have to submit requests one at a time to individual companies. That means fully exercising your rights can be a pain. There are likely hundreds of third parties holding your information right now. 

Plus, Utah’s deletion rights are also more limited than in other states. You can’t request a company delete all your data – it only has to delete the data you have provided it with. Companies often buy data from other places. There’s not a way for you to get companies to delete data they’ve bought.

How do I exercise my Utah privacy law rights?

To exercise your core rights – accessing, correcting or deleting the data a company has already collected on you – you must submit a request directly to each business. Companies must tell you how to send a request in their privacy policy.

Read: How to read a privacy policy

Where can I find instructions for exercising my rights in a privacy policy?

When looking at a privacy policy, search for a section titled “Your Privacy Rights,” “Your Rights and Choices,” or something similar. Use ctrl+f for the term “privacy”, “rights”, or “opt” to find this information more quickly. In this section, the business should give you instructions for how to access, correct, or delete your personal data. It will typically be a web form or an email address you need to send a request to.

If you run into problems during this process — like an invalid email address, or a web form where Utah isn’t available in a dropdown menu — make sure to log a complaint with the AG’s office. That way the AG knows which companies need a talking to.

How could the Utah Consumer Privacy Act be better?

The Utah Consumer Privacy Act gives you some rights to ask companies to delete your data. That’s good. It’d be even better, however, if less of the work of protecting your privacy was on you. 

The best thing for consumers is to change how companies can collect and use data in the first place.

To maximally protect consumers, it should be on companies to only collect the data they need to deliver the service you’re expecting to get. There’s no good reason for your fast food loyalty app to be collecting your location 24/7 or your VR game app to be collecting your social security number. They plain don’t need it.

Companies should also be limited to only using the data they collect for what the consumer is expecting. There’s no good reason for your health app to turn around and sell your prescription information to advertisers or your child’s internet-enabled stuffed animals to be sending transcripts of your child’s conversations to third parties.

This matters for your personal security. The more data that companies collect, and the more companies they sell it to, the more likely it is that your personal information is going to be exposed in a breach or a hack and end up in the wrong hands. This makes it more likely you’ll be the victim of identity theft, financial fraud and hyper-targeted scams. 

Like all of the state privacy laws on the books – the Utah Consumer Privacy Act has room for improvement. Utah’s law currently earns a F grade on our recent scorecard report – co-authored with the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) – as it still puts too much work on consumers to protect themselves. In fact, Utah is tied for second-worst law in the country.

Every state that has passed a law has the opportunity to make it stronger. Instituting stronger upfront rules on how companies can collect and use data would improve the privacy and security of Utah consumers. 

We look forward to seeing how Utah continues to strengthen its protections in the future. And in the meantime, folks should take advantage of their new rights.

What else can I do to protect my data?

Since your Utah privacy rights are incredibly limited, we highly recommend taking other steps to protect yourself. We’ve got simple ways you can boost your data security here.

See below for even more tips to put you more in control of your information online.

Social media privacy tips

How to request and download your Facebook data

How to request and download your Instagram data

Stop Instagram from harvesting so much of your data